WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for August 29

Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, Facebook has reduced its human news team's influence over its Trending news ticker, Opera's password syncing service has suffered a security breach, a team of scientists have completed a year-long simulated Mars mission and more.

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Facebook has announced an update to its trending news feature, removing text summaries written by staff members and replacing them with stats on how many people are talking about each topic (BBC). The change comes following accusations that the human-curated news ticker "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers". Although Facebook says it found no indication of such systematic bias when it investigated, it has taken steps to reduce the amount of human input into the system, although Facebook news staff will still be responsible for ensuring that trending topics relate to actual and current news stories.

Opera has warned users that "some data, including some of our sync users’ passwords and account information, such as login names, may have been compromised" during an attack on its sync system detected this week (TechCrunch). The company has reset all Opera sync passwords and notified users of the breach via email. Users are also advised to "reset any passwords to third party sites they may have synchronized with the service." A Chinese technology consortium agreed to acquire significant parts of the Norwegian company, including its browser and privacy business, for $600 million earlier this month.

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The cool science of Nasa's hot mission to send a probe to the Sun

A team of six researchers have completed a year-long simulation of a mission to Mars, which took place in an isolated dome, measuring just 11 metres in diameter and 6 metres in height, on the barren heights of Mauna Loa in Hawaii (The Guardian). The international team, which included an astrobiologist, a physicist a pilot, an architect, a doctor/journalist and a soil scientist, were only allowed to leave the dome in spacesuits and had to deal with the pressure of close quarters and managing interpersonal conflicts while carrying out research. French crew member Cyprien Verseux said that "I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic. I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."

The European Commission is set to rule this week on a three-year enquiry into Apple's tax bill, arranged with Ireland, where the company's European headquarters are based (Business Insider UK). Commentators expect that the EC will rule that Ireland's special tax deal with Apple constitutes state aid, and is thus illegal. This would result in a tax bill of up to $19 billion for the US tech firm.

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On Saturday, Nasa's Juno spacecraft successfully completed the first of 36 planned orbits of the planet Jupiter, coming within just 4,200km of the gas giant (Ars Technica). Nasa Juno project manager Rick Nybakken said that "early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders." Scientists from the space agency have already begun receiving data from the spacecraft and the first images from the flyby are expected to be released in the next couple of weeks.

The Metropolitan Police in London are trialling an automated facial recognition (AFR) system at the Notting Hill Carnival over this bank holiday weekend (The Register). The system will, according to the police, use "overt cameras which scan the faces of those passing by and flag up potential matches against a database of custody images. The database has been populated with images of individuals who are forbidden from attending Carnival, as well as individuals wanted by police who it is believed may attend Carnival to commit offences." This is the second UK trial of an AFR system, following a similar experiment at 2015's Download festival.

SpaceX has confirmed that its Dragon cargo capsule has safely landed in the Pacific Ocean, "carrying thousands of pounds of @NASA science and research cargo back from the @Space_Station" (Popular Science). SpaceX also tweeted an image of the capsule's parachute-slowed descent. Experiments on board include samples from a rodent test of the epigenetic effects of spaceflight on the organs of mice and cells from a project to investigate the effects of microgravity on the human heart.

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We've found a lake of water on Mars. So what happens next?

French games publishing giant Ubisoft has announced that it's to take down four of its free-to-play games by the end of the year (Motherboard). Real-time strategy title The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot will be the first to shutter its doors, on 25 October, while 31 October will see the closure of the Might & Magic Duel of Champions online card game and browser-based strategy game Tom Clancy's EndWar Online, with third-person tactical shooter Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Phantoms to close on 1 December. Online purchases in the games have already ceased. The move is in keeping with a market shift towards paid-for games that include optional in-game purchases to boost publishers' profits, rather than free games which rely on them.

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In an interview with IGN, the creators of 80s-inspired horror hit, Stranger Things have discussed the video games that influenced the world they created. Revealing a number of spoilers for those who've yet to see the series, Matt and Ross Duffer say that their key gaming inspirations included Silent Hill, The Last of Us and Dark Souls. Matt Duffer comments that "there's a lot of different influences, and some of them I'm probably not even aware of. I just know that we do play and have always played a lot of video games so I feel like there is a lot of that seeped into the show."

Turning Flash-based browser games into a commentary on the art form, Josh Millard's Ennuigi has you guide Luigi, the "also-ran" Mario brother as he wanders the fractured remains of the Mushroom Kingdom, chain-smoking and "ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made" (Polygon). It's a darkly amusing take on video game worlds as Luigi wonders "where are the cities, where are the homes? What is a kingdom with no people to protect?"

WhatsApp changed its privacy policy for the first time in four years yesterday, announcing that users' phone numbers will be shared with its parent company, Facebook. While WhatsApp has promised it won’t sell or share users' numbers with advertisers, many are unhappy with the change. The data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, has said it will look into whether the changes comply with privacy rules. The good news is that it's simple to prevent your phone number being shared, most easily by pressing a button in the terms and conditions attached to the update.

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